In racing it sometimes happens, despite all precautions, that some second or third string, put in to make the pace, will romp away from the whole field, including the animal which carried the rosiest hopes of the inspired pacemaker's owner. With some such mixture of exultation and rue as may fill that sportsman's bosom, the inhabitants of Great Britain and Ireland have just seen Mr WB Yeats victoriously flashing past the post, as the sporting reports say, for the Nobel Prize for Literature, a guerdon of the value of about £7,500. In the Athens of the best period, according to her greatest historian, a crown of honour was doubly esteemed for running well into money; and in the late Middle Ages, as we hear from Scott's Dugald Dalgetty, a failure to accept any coin freely offered was "a thing seldom seen in a Christian land".

Even among the hardy inhabitants of primitive Scythia we are assured by Herodotus that "it was an established habit to receive rather than to give". To root this deeply seated human habit out of the hearts of Welsh rugby footballers seems to be at present the dearest ambition of the Scottish Rugby Union.

Fortunately, however, professionalism is no sin in such sports as literary composition, and Mr Yeats is to be congratulated, almost without reserve, on lifting this substantial stake. He is a poet of real greatness; prose, too, he can write like an angel. The one reserve is - what about Mr Hardy? The only English or Irish writer, besides Mr Yeats, who has borne off this mead is Mr Kipling; and, splendid as are the moments of genius in both Mr Kipling and Mr Yeats, would anyone whose sense of literary quality is fully instructed and wholly judicial rank either of them beside Mr Hardy? Be this, however, only a momentary grumble. For surely it is a pretty high achievement for any jury, of any country, to judge with even approximate justice between the merits of things written in all the languages of civilisation. Imagine weighing Mr Masefield against D'Annunzio, or Tchekov's plays against Mr Galsworthy's novels. We may well be thankful that in choosing for the Nobel prize a writer from our islands the jury have at any rate chosen one of the four or five greatest. We ought to feel like Stevenson's Scotsman who could not quite say that the elders of his kirk had chosen the very best new minister possible, "But, mindin' Aikin and McNeill, I wondered they had done sae weel."